


In which women fight over Tarvek

by Overlord_Bethany



Series: Always Send Knives [10]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, and also Tiffy, this poor man has only been in Paris for a week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:07:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22674553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlord_Bethany/pseuds/Overlord_Bethany
Summary: It's not even half as much fun as it sounds.
Series: Always Send Knives [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1088160
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35





	In which women fight over Tarvek

**Author's Note:**

> The tone of this scene might somewhat reflect my mental state, which is to say that I have seasonal sinusitis and I am Tired.

A sharp drop jolted him awake, and Tarvek managed not to yelp. He hadn’t expected to sleep at all tonight, not after the terrible events of the day and yet…

And yet.

Another lurch slammed his head back against something solid, and fresh pain shot through his skull. Ah. The growing knot there suggested how he had come to be outside, the cool nighttime breeze mussing his hair and slicing through the silk of his pajamas. He shivered. It didn’t really surprise him that someone had taken the opportunity to abduct him. He cracked one eye open, then immediately wished he had not. The lights of Paris whipped by at alarming speed. The contents of his stomach made a bid for freedom.

“Hey! If you’re going to puke, do it over the side!”

Over the…? Tarvek squinted through the night, and he realized with growing horror that the soft lights of the city illuminated far more of the vehicle than he wanted to see. He sat on a narrow oval of planks, at the center of which was mounted an apparatus cobbled together of the worst, most rickety-looking jumble of scrap, upon which some fool had mounted a ship’s wheel. A person stood there, looming over him, one hand on the helm and the other on her hip. Tarvek tried to focus on her rather than on the two swivel-mounted propellers and the ridiculously outsized sail protruding off the back.

“Is this,” he managed, “an _air skiff?_ ”

“Not _just_ an air skiff!” crowed his abductor with unreasonable pride to take in such a ramshackle machine. “ _This_ is the skiff that conquered the wilds! _This_ skiff is damn near indestructible!”

No _._ Tarvek looked around, noting gouges and scorch marks on almost every surface. An indestructible skiff would be legend itself, surely not piloted by some cut-rate thug come to take advantage of his unguarded state. Surely this woman exaggerated.

Not that such speculation improved his current situation any.

“Commandeered it from Old Grump-Face himself. He had it coming, letting this fine craft gather dust.”

‘Fine craft’, Tarvek reflected, was something of an overstatement. Afraid that the smallest movement might overbalance the wretched thing and capsize them, he tucked his hands beneath him and tried not to think about the unreasonable speeds the skiff seemed to attain. His captor yanked a lever on a control array—apparently cobbled together from bits of no less than seven different machines—above her head, kicked some hidden switch, and spun the wheel hard to the right. The skiff banked into a steep turn, flattening Tarvek’s already-rebellious stomach inside him and affording him too clear a view of the brightly lit street below. Yelping in alarm, desperately trying to maintain possession of what little he’d eaten that day, Tarvek clutched at the gunwale. The skiff skimmed along the face of a building, ruffling curtains and disrupting potted plants as it went. His captor’s teeth flashed white in the darkness.

“You’re fun!” she said, clearly enjoying herself too much.

“I don’t want to be fun! I want to be alive!”

“Oh, that doesn’t really matter. Not when—“

A small object that resembled a gas canister sailed over the side of the skiff and landed at Tarvek’s feet. While he and his abductor both eyed it with suspicion, it popped open, and a tinny voice issued from within.

“Hailing air skiff Queen of the Wastes: You are in violation of University airspace. Divert your course at once, or else drop anchor at the nearest mooring station.”

When Tarvek has collected his wits sufficiently enough not to sputter, the most intelligent comment he managed was, “You _registered_ this derelict?!”

Sneering in the half-light, his captor yanked another lever and gave the wheel two sharp turns. “‘Course I did, and she’s no derelict! We wouldn’t want her impounded for something stupid like a mooring violation, would we?” The bottom dropped out of Tarvek’s stomach as the skiff plummeted toward the avenue below.

None of this made any sense. Here he was, probably about to die on a stolen air skiff that had been registered to prevent it getting impounded if it’s pilot decided to moor it illegally. He’d have been better off with the exploding spiders.

Exploding spiders?

Nearer to the street, more light splashed across the skiff, illuminating the face of his abductor. With mounting dread, Tarvek realized he recognized her. “The terrible bartender!” he blurted. “You like setting things on fire!”

“You’ve got it the wrong way around.” She gave the wheel a hard spin, and the skiff heeled over in its steepest turn yet. “I set things on fire professionally. The bartending was for fun.”

“We’re going to die,” moaned Tarvek.

“Don’t be such a—“

Such a what, precisely, Tarvek never found out, for a grapnel arced over the gunwale and landed near the helm. It skidded across the scarred old deck until it found purchase. Tarvek clung to the gunwale, but his captor took their sudden, sickening change in momentum in her swaggering stride. She yanked a sword from a scabbard that hung from the control array, and, grinning wildly, she turned to face the other skiff coming alongside. Its three occupants looked to board the so-called Queen of the Wastes. Green glass lenses gleamed beneath the brim of a tall, official-looking hat.

“This is Air Constable Marat,” commanded a voice that was unmistakably Tiffy’s. Three known aliases meant she probably had at least a dozen more. “Debark your passenger and remove your vehicle from University airspace.”

Tarvek’s captor laughed. “Are you planning to come and take him?”

Tiffy gestured with one white-gloved hand, and the two men beside her hopped over to the Queen of the Wastes. Tarvek’s captor’s sword flashed out and slapped the pistol from the hand of one of them.

“Come _on!_ ” she complained, sounding in her annoyance a little too like Gil. “At least pretend you mean it!” Swift as a striking snake, she stabbed the other one through the shoulder. She was toying with them, of that Tarvek was certain. Her grin gleamed in the low light.

“Captain.” Tiffy had one foot up on the gunwale of her own skiff. “Stand down.”

The so-called captain’s grin wavered slightly. “If you know who I am,” she said, gesturing toward Tarvek with her bloody sword, “then you know that I’m transporting valuable equipment for a time-sensitive science thingie.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tiffy, her voice frosty. She kicked over a belaying pin, which turned out to house a switch. An impossibly loud _BRRRRAAAAAAAWWWP!_ noise bellowed out of her little skiff. It rattled Tarvek’s teeth and vibrated the sword right out of the captain’s hand.

“Is that a sonic condenser?”

No one heard him, not over the ringing in their ears. Tiffy had produced two pistols, both of which she had trained on the captain. Inexplicably, the captain’s grin brightened until it could outshine the sun.

“You cheated!” Tarvek saw her lips form the words, saw her obvious delight. He tried to edge farther away from her, but on the little craft he had nowhere to go. The gunwale pressed against the backs of his legs, reminding him of the uncomfortable distance to the street below. Could he survive leaping overboard? Possibly. Did he want to?

Probably anything would be better than proximity to the captain.

An arm encircled him from behind, making his choice for him. As he felt himself yanked upward, up and off of the skiff, any yelp of surprise that escaped him would be lost to the deafened people below. He still twisted his head around, trying to see who was swinging him to safety, when Varpa deposited him on a nearby awning.

“Thanks,” he said, apparently too loudly, for Varpa gestured for quiet and melted deeper into the shadows.

“Lead on,” he whispered, probably still loudly. “I can’t wait to find out what Seffie wants.”

Varpa almost smiled, just for a moment, before leading him away from the skiffs, away from the captain and Tiffy, away from the University. Well. The captain wouldn’t kill Tiffy. At least, he didn’t think she would.

For the moment, Tarvek had other matters to occupy his mind. He could worry about Colette’s spy friend later, in the light of day, his hearing had returned to normal and the ache inside him had dulled. For now? His eyes traced Varpa’s back in the darkness, searching for a cause so urgent Seffie would send for him in the middle of the night. Perhaps Tweedle had goten up to something idiotic again.

It didn’t matter. None of this mattered. None of this would have even _happened_ if he’d had someone to watch his back. He settled into a sullen silence that would carry through the rest of the night, no matter what Seffie wanted.

Paris really wasn’t what he had expected. Not at all. Still, if he got some sleep for once, he figured he could probably learn to work with it.


End file.
